siberianbear

I decided to submit this because I have always been fascinated with Jimmy Carter. What a genuine, decent person. But history has judged him as one of the worst presidents.

I was in third grade when Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan. Our teacher gave us an assignment to create a campaign poster for your favorite candidate. I chose Jimmy Carter, and added the campaign slogan, "I will gladly trade peanuts for the American hostages" (referring to to Carter's history as a farmer and to the Iran hostage crisis [1]). I thought I was really clever at the time, but now I think I was just being a stupid smartass.

Whenever I have seen Carter in the press since his presidency, it always seems like he is going something unambiguously good, like building houses with Habitat for Humanity or trying to negotiate peace agreements between unfriendly countries as an unbiased mediator.

I think we won't have this great man with us for much longer. The world will be a worse place when he departs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

I wish there were a way to give per-feature permissions to apps, instead of just a "yes or no" for the whole app. For instance, I could approve this app to access the internet, but not to get my contact list or calendar.

I was once on the balcony of the cafe at the modern art museum in Sydney, Australia, quietly drinking some coffee. A bright red bird landed on my table and was eyeing me closely.

I was thinking, "What in the world does this bird want? I don't have any food, and why would a bird want coffee?"

I figured out the answer. He made a bold grab for the sugar packet. It was too heavy to fly off with, so he just dragged it away from me, opened it, and ate it while I continued to drink my coffee.

I found this article interesting because I couldn't for the life of me understand why so many people spend so much money on their cars. For me, a car was just a convenient way to get to where I wanted to go. My ego wasn't tied up in at all. I didn't own a car as a way to show off my status. I drove a series of "beaters" and often did my own maintenance and repair of relatively simple issues. I finally bought exactly one new car for cash, and drove it for twelve years.

I never carried collision or comprehensive insurance, having the opinion that dealing with insurance is always a pain in the ass. The insurance premium is simply a markup on the expected value of what the insurance company would pay out. My "inner mathematician" couldn't permit it.

Because of this, my total cost of ownership of cars was really low. I piled all the money I saved into investing, and came out far ahead.

I sold my last car when I retired. Now, I walk everywhere: to the supermarket, to the park, to the gym, to restaurants, to the downtown bars. I'm so glad not to own a car.

It's an interesting article by a noted author, but the trend seems to be going the opposite way: Microsoft is getting more and more intrusive with each generation.

I few months ago I wiped Windows 10 off my system did a fresh install of Windows 7. My sanity level has increased significantly. Cardiologists around the world can rejoice... at least until the EOL of Windows 7.

I first found about The Onion in 1991 when I was a summer intern at Intel in Folsom, California. A fellow intern from UW Madison told me about it. I subscribed to the paper version: this was before it was on the internet. It was $28 a year.

Two years later, they went to a color version and raised the price to about $45 a year, if I recall correctly. I said "screw it" and didn't renew my subscription.

It was more of an "underground" thing at the time. I enjoyed it again a few years later when it became an internet site.

I remember the first time Intel tried this, in 1998, when they introduced the i740 AGP card. [1][2] The data sheet is still out there if you know where to look. [3] It made everyone in the industry from S3, Matrox, ATI, Nvidia and 3dfx all tremble. In the end, it flopped.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/3

[2] https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/video/v2740tv/v...

[3] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

It's a good question. I've thought the same thing. Historically, Intel's competitive advantage has been in manufacturing. As that slows down due to the general slowdown of Moore's law or just because they don't stay on top of their game, it seems likely that AMD, ARM and Nvidia will eat more and more of Intel's lunch.

I got rich in Silicon Valley from my equity compensation. I bounced around various companies and startups. Two of them were successful and had public offerings. Of those two, one was spectacularly successful.

Sure, luck played a role. But my pure grit and tenacity also played a role. Taking on hard bugs and solving them played a role: I solved a lot of hard bugs that others couldn't solve. Spending Saturday afternoons at the library reading books on topics like software program management and phase locked loops played a role. Having some talent at hiring and managing people helped. Spending my teenage years writing clever little programs in 6502 assembly language on my Commodore 64 instead of smoking weed and partying helped. Having a strong knack for math and computer science helped. Living simply and reinvesting my profits helped.

In my 20s, I couldn't understand why people at my same wealth level in Silicon Valley were often driving $100K cars and engaging in other types of ostentatious spending displays. I was constantly surprised by the people making lots of money who didn't really have any clue how money works. Wall Street has its own game to separate you from your wealth, and they'll do it if you don't understand how the Warren Buffets of the world value equities and read balance sheets.

You have to get up and out and play the game to win. If you play, you'll lose a lot of games. When you lose, don't lose the lesson. There is a secret message embedded in every failure. Figure out the message, get up and go at it again. Sometimes, you'll suffer a humiliating failure a few more times before you get the lesson.

Of course, someone who is too lazy to go play the game will ascribe success to "luck." And the person who just can't "get" the secret messages embedded in their failures will ascribe success to "luck."

I've been dirt poor. For a whole year at the university, I slept on a camping pad on the floor because I couldn't even afford a real mattress, much less a bed. I've also been middle class, and now I'm rich. It's clear that being rich is better than being middle class, and being middle class is better than being poor, but being rich has its own problems. Even if you don't advertise your wealth, malicious actors smell it on you and try to separate you from it. Rich people sometimes say things like, "My only real friends are the ones who were my friends before I got rich." I get that mindset completely.

Money lubricates a lot of things in life, but it doesn't completely solve very many issues. The one single thing that I appreciate the most about money is that I'm no longer obliged to sell my own time just to survive. I spent my afternoon today, a weekday, taking a walk in the park, meeting a friend for a late lunch, going to the gym and then reading a book. In my previous life, I would have been stuck at work and wouldn't have done any of those things.

I read through the list and agreed with every item. Some are very broad, and I'd add some caveats if I were discussing them in detail. The one that made me think the hardest was "Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games." That's true, but sizing people up and figuring out what "game" they're playing is part of being successful.

Yeah, I got the same message. Russia gets no love on the Internet. So many web sites just block all Russian IP addresses.

I feel much more sorry for the citizens of Sweden than I do for that "poor lady" who made a point of looking like Zuckerburg's tool. If Cecilia Wikström was my elected representative, I'd start investigating how to expatriate.

A couple of years there was a discussion about the death of Pieter Hintjens [1][2], a semi-famous computer scientist who had just passed away. I had heard of him before his death, but didn't know very much about him. I decided to take a look at his web site, and noticed that he had written a book about psychopaths called "The Psychopath Code" [3]. (The PDF download is free.)

At that exact moment, I had my life wrapped up with a psychopath whose behavior, strange stories and webs of lies were difficult to understand. I read Pieter's book and instantly everything made sense.

Some of the things you mentioned were covered in Pieter's book and I also noticed with the psychopath in my own life:

(A) overly dramatic behavior that is just a hair off

(B) lots of manufactured drama

(C) very charismatic

(D) you can't figure it out by yourself: you can only figure it out when all the various corroborators get together. This is because every target is delivered a separate set of lies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12634590

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens

[3] http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths

A lot of Reddit is about which subreddits you participate in and how the moderation works. I participate in some niche subreddits that are absolutely great and are good discussion grounds on those particular topics.

All the default subreddits suck.

Steve, I'm no kind of expert on how to deliver web pages.

But you're being a bit obtuse. Several people here have complained about the typeface being huge and they're right. On my browser (Firefox Windows desktop), it's huge, like 45 or 50 points. And I couldn't reduce it by changing the zoom using the control-scroll wheel.

It was so annoying that I just closed the window. If you are interested in getting your message across to me personally, you're going to have to do it without forcing me to read it in fifty-point type.

In Russia, men have a higher tendency to die in late middle age due to alcoholism and work-related fatalities. The difference in the "15-64 demographic" is really only visible starting at age 50. In the 20-30 range, there is no real difference.

Update: voice.google.com doesn't fully load.

I think I will protest by throwing a paper plane out my window at the appointed time this evening.

Update: I threw three paper plans from my flat window at the appointed time. Apparently I was the only one: I didn't notice anyone nearby doing the same.

Odd, all of those are working fine for me. I went to MSDN just now and it seemed to load slow, but I don't regularly use it so I don't know if anything changed.

I'm in Russia now. This morning I got the message on Telegram to throw a paper plane out my window tonight at exactly 7:00 p.m.

Telegram has been working fine here except for a short period right when the block started.

I haven't personally experienced any problems with the internet, but yesterday one of my Russian friends commented that she couldn't log into her Russian bank account because of the banned ip addresses.

Okay, I can accept that perspective. But that's not exactly in the way they mean it in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, when they say "deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja," they mean, "I'm can get a quarter-million people to look at your website." Obviously, that means quite something different than carving peoples' eyes out, after which they won't be able to see any websites.

I was there for about that amount of time when I manged to build enough reputation and connections to get into one of the hot startups at the time. I was 29 at the time. I really wanted to leave Silicon Valley, but I already realized that I had made my big break if I played it right.

If I hadn't gotten into to this startup (now a big company on the NASDAQ), I would have left and moved to Austin.

I continued to hate Silicon Valley more every year, but it made me rich.

I'm no expert on Japanese culture or ninjas, but my idea of of a ninja is someone who is dressed in black, infiltrates your building, kills you with a thrown weapon, and then escapes without being seen. So, if you "deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja," then you're not a very good ninja.

It's possible. I came to Silicon Valley with a Honda CRX and the stuff that would fit in it, a degree from the University of California and a net worth of about negative $2500. I left sixteen years later a multimillionaire.

I'm glad I left. It is a good place to get rich if you're a programmer. But I'm never going back.

I enjoyed the first couple of years in Silicon Valley. I started to hate it more every year after that.

If I was 21 years old now with a CS/CE/EE degree, I'd go to another second-tier tech hub, like NYC, Austin or maybe Boulder.

I asked a California business attorney this question. She said that you really don't have that much protection. If your idea/company is valuable enough, your huge tech company employer will just sue you into oblivion. The legal costs alone will bury you. The specific California statute that protects what you do with your own time and resources doesn't protect you very much.

I hired software engineers at a big company in Silicon Valley for many years. I interviewed thousands at university career fairs. I hired dozens of summer interns and full-time people.

My take on a master's degree is that I treat it like a year or two of experience: experience that the poor fool didn't get paid for. Of course, a person with an MS is going to be a stronger candidate than one with just a BS, since they've had more experience. But I can take the engineer with the BS and give him the year of experience myself.

Perhaps it's different in Europe: they seem to value high education credentials more. I didn't care about the status of an MS and neither did most of my colleagues.

I think the only reason to do an MS in the USA is if you're a foreigner trying to get residency through an H1B visa. There's a separate quota category for people with an MS degree earned in the USA.

I have no direct knowledge of academic careers like mathematics.

I'm white, but I came from a lower middle-class background in a rural area. My parents were barely supportive of me going to the university. I'm a real-life redneck.

I eventually made millions in Silicon Valley and retired at age 40.

One of the best pieces of advice I received in life was this: don't sell yourself short. Try, strive, and then let other people reject you. But never reject yourself. And if others reject you, stand up and try again. If they hit you harder, then get up quicker and hit back harder.

Perhaps you'll find that you're not really all that you thought. Or perhaps you'll find that with each small success, your odds increase in the next round because you learned something important from your failure in the previous round. If you don't stand up and fight the next round, you'll never know the true answer.

I'm an American living in Russia. Russia got rid of daylight savings time in 2014. [1]. I love, it's great.

One of the most confusing part of daylight savings time is that the dates that it occurs on vary between countries. Trying to figure out how to get hold of people back in the states at an agreed-upon time was a huge PITA.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-abandons-perman...

The Psychopath Code [1], by Peter Hintjens. You can download a free legal copy.

Psychopaths and sociopaths are out there: they're about five to ten percent of the population. Once you've had your life intertwined with one, you'll never see the world the same. Know how to identify them and deal with them.

I learned about Peter Hintjens and his book when his death was reported here on Hacker News.

[1] http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths

How would you get everyone to agree on the blacklisting? How would be enforced? What if some clients accept nodes containing 'blacklisted' addresses, and some don't? When if then a client that 'blacklists' addresses sees a block that contains a transaction whose inputs are 99% 'legit' coins and 1% 'blacklisted' coins? Should it honor it?

What you're really proposing is a hard fork, which is a morass of problems. And why should everyone suffer all this grief just because the security team on one exchange in Japan is staffed with people who don't know what they are doing?

The United States used to have this for soft drinks. I remember taking my father's empty Dr. Pepper bottles back to the supermarket for gas money as a teenager. The rebate (just a refund of what you paid for it when you bought it) was about $1 per eight-pack of bottles... this was around 1990 or so. I remember how heavy and sturdy these re-usable bottles were.

This was phased out sometime in the 1990s. I guess it was just too costly for the bottlers.

I retired a few years ago, shortly after I turned forty. I worked in Silicon Valley for a long time and saved almost all of my take-home income, which is what allowed me to amass a large sum.

When I was living in Silicon Valley, I couldn't wrap my head around how much pointless consumption my colleagues engaged in. Couldn't they see that they could escape this stupid rat race and leave if they just saved their money? I guess the liked the rat race more than I did. I hated the rat race and don't regret leaving. I should have retired sooner.